I had to laugh when I saw FDA was warning consumers in Puerto Rico that some hand sanitizers had high levels of bacteria (Burkholderia cepacia) that can cause serious infections. It's not really funny of course, except that one of the hand sanitizers was called “MD Quality Hand Sanitizer” (the…

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving - we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it - but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr

Recently i have been browsing through a book called What About Darwin?, which is a collection of quotations from various worthies regarding -- surprise! -- Charles Darwin. One that jumped out at me was a statement from Calvin Coolidge. This is from a letter he wrote to his father:
I see [Oliver…

Advertisment

Donate

Science 2.0 is where scientists are the journalists. We are a science education nonprofit operating under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Please make a tax-deductible donation if you value independent science communication, collaboration, participation, and support open access.

You can also shop using Amazon Smile and though you pay nothing more we get a tiny something.

More by this author

(I was originally going to hold off posting this until May 31st, but there seems little point)
I've been blogging here at Scienceblogs since January 2006, nearly three and a half years. During that time I have made many good friends - both fellow bloggers and readers - and have enjoyed the support…

From a report released by BIO: The Biotechnology Industry Organization:
On average, only 28% of the high school students taking the ACT , which is a national standardized test for college admission , reached a score indicating college readiness for biology and no state reached even 50%.
Only 52% of…

NCSE has announced that two remaining anti-evolution bills have died in committee: Alabama & Missouri.
To recap the year:
Mississippi - dead in committee
Oklahoma - dead in committee
Iowa - dead in committee
New Mexico - dead in committee
Florida - dead in committee
Alabama - dead in committee…

So I'm trying to simplify things in real life as I think I am suffering from information overload (among other things).
First task was to clean up my Facebook friends. From here on, it's family, colleagues and (usually graduate) students. Folks I know only in virtual space are likely to have gotten…

More reads

Yesterday's post about VPython simulation of the famous bicycle wheel demo showed that you can get the precession and nutation from a simulation that only includes forces. But this is still kind of mysterious, from the standpoint of basic physics intuition. Specifically, it's sort of hard to see how any of this produces a force up and to the left, as required for the precession to happen.
I spent…

"Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth." -Jean Rostand
One of the most awesome events, literally, that happens in this Universe is when stars -- giant nuclear furnaces like our Sun -- die in the most energetic way possible: a supernova.
Video credit: Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (Ors Hunor Detre, Oliver Krause), via YouTube.
Every star that ever lived gets two chances…